ABSTRACT
To what extent can multilingualism act as a transformative force in contexts of racial and class-based inequality? This chapter considers this question in the context of Hong Kong, where according to the policy of ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’, citizens should be fluent in English, Cantonese and Mandarin and literate in English and standard written Chinese. In this context, learning Cantonese has been proposed as the key to educational and economic success for Hong Kong South Asians, who are generally constructed as linguistically deficient, regardless of their complex multilingual repertoires. Yet although language is presented as the key to socioeconomic mobility, this chapter argues that such language ideologies hide the true difficulty of moving within entrenched racial and socioeconomic hierarchies, as only select actors can take advantage of possessing the key linguistic resources. Against this background, even a greater recognition of South Asians’ complex repertoires may not be especially helpful. Amidst increasing sociolinguistic interest in the destabilization of linguistic and social category boundaries, this research demonstrates the importance of exploring how these boundaries are maintained, how they are consequential for various individuals and groups, and what possible limits the transformative potential of language has.
